Liberate your business by simplifying IT complexity for better cloud, data, and application management. The Cisco® data center goes anywhere your data is.

Managing the Anywhere Data Center

The new data center extends past the boundaries of on-premises hardware into a landscape of digital infrastructure that’s fast, complicated, and always expanding. This requires IT to take a new approach to data center infrastructure management.

Critical components:Automation for every stage of the IT lifecycle

Embracing multicloud to go wherever your data goes

Pervasive security across the entire network

OverviewMeet the anywhere

data center.

AutomationJoin the automation

journey.

MulticloudManaging the

multicloud

SecuritySecuring the

anywhere data center

OpportunityDiscovering potential

everywhere

Home Overview Automation Multicloud Security Opportunity

New data center demandsThe data center’s essential role is supporting, delivering, and securing applications across the enterprise. And applications follow the data. Now organizations need and can get data from everywhere and at any time to answer questions about their markets and customers.

New centers of dataThe new data center enables distribution of apps and data across on-premises resources as well as private, hybrid, and public cloud infrastructure. The challenge for IT is to enforce security, compliance, and consistent policies across this edge-to-cloud continuum.

Change is disruption.IT has the opportunity to harness this complexity and evolve with the disruption—not fight against it. Disruption, when properly managed, has the potential to be beautiful.

Ninety percent of all the data that exists today was created by users, apps, and devices in just the last two years.1

Overview

Meet the anywhere data center. More data is being created outside of traditional data centers as users who want more control and access to on-demand resources are bypassing IT and turning to the cloud. At the center of this change is a new breed of apps that are modular and distributed across the enterprise, built continuously and rapidly, and increasingly ML-enabled and AI-powered, which complicates the modern app environment.

Three trends are adding to the complexity:

90%

Home Overview Automation Multicloud Security Opportunity

1. “Data Never Sleeps 5.0,” DOMO, 2017.

The new data center is no longer defined by where your hardware sits, but by where your data goes. To respond to this trend, your IT team must transform its infrastructure and operations. The first key to reducing complexity, saving time,

and keeping up with business demand is automation.

Check out the IDC Analyst Connection to learn more about the changing data center landscape.

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Go to Automation

Intent-based networkingIntent-based networking (IBN) is an evolution of automation that addresses complexity, speed, and talent challenges. IBN is designed to help businesses deliver services faster and with increased reliability while eliminating outages in more complex environments. IBN is a holistic, full-lifecycle validation architecture that translates business intent into network configurations, then automatically activates it across the entire data center, and finally works to ensure that the intent remains intact.

Workflow automation and workload optimizationCisco automation solutions integrate with ecosystem partner platforms and popular IT toolchains to automate repetitive, complex workflows. This empowers IT with better predictability, reduced risk, and more time every day.

Automated and programmable data center switching and computeCisco offers programmability and open APIs across its networking and computing infrastructure portfolio to increase efficiency and allow for more dynamic, impactful forms of automation throughout the data center.

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Automation

Join the automation journey.Cisco considers automation a critical capability for saving time and meeting business demands while freeing valuable IT resources for more strategic processes.

Cisco’s automation strategy includes:

1:20

Through 2023, ninety percent of current applications will still be in use.1

90%

Home Overview Automation Multicloud Security Opportunity

1. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Networking, Andrew Lerner and Joe Skorupa, 11 July 2018.

2. Artificial Intelligence-Driven, Cloud-based Systems Management Platforms Fill an Important Market Need, IDC, July 2018.

3. “Operating Model Transformation Leverages Connected Systems,” IDC, 2018, https://www.idc.com/promo/thirdplatform/digitaltransformation/operatingmodel.

Automation has to be enabled at all critical points within the infrastructure in order to free your IT team to take on more strategic tasks. This is a key first step. But what do they need to expand their enterprise into the multicloud seamlessly?

Go to Multicloud

AI-assisted operationsIT executives are seeing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in IT operations management tools as a way to compete in areas of speed and quality.2 Cisco leverages the power of AI/ML to analyze real-time telemetry in the network and in a cloud-connected computing infrastructure. This helps businesses identify behavior deviations, vulnerabilities, and inefficiencies in ways that make their IT organizations more proactive.

By 2022, nearly 40 percent of operational processes will be self-healing and self-learning, minimizing the need for human intervention or adjustments.340%

Cisco’s unique automation capabilities include:Always-on network assuranceGain complete and continuous visibility into your network with Cisco’s predictive analytics. If an infrastructure issue is detected, the system prompts you to take a suggested corrective action.

Workload optimizationIf servers are overloaded, application performance suffers. Cisco offers automation that matches workloads to your infrastructure to find and dynamically maintain the perfect balance.

Cloud-based AI OpsAI Ops platforms use big data, modern machine learning, and other advanced analytics technologies to enhance IT operations with proactive, personal, and dynamic insight.

Good multicloud starts at home.Because the public cloud won’t always be suitable for every workload or data type, Cisco offers private cloud solutions that arm cloud builders with flexible, best-of-breed options for data center automation and modernization.

The developer is the new customer.Developers require functions and services from multiple public clouds to on-premises data and apps. IT must provide a consistent operating environment for the entire application lifecycle that delivers the security, scalability, resiliency, and governance that developers need.

Take control of public cloud.Organizations need to effectively integrate with many different public and private resources, which is why Cisco offers a multicloud portfolio that includes security, analytics, cloud management, networking, computing, and advisory services.

Multicloud

Managing the multicloudThe cloud is no longer just about efficiency—or even flexibility or speed; it is about business innovation. Cisco believes it is essential that developers are empowered to build apps that are aligned with business needs, not IT limitations. Therefore, multicloud is the new reality for IT.

Ninety-three percent of cloud adopters intend to be using multiple clouds in the next 12 months, and 58 percent of cloud adopters work with at least four vendors.1

93%

Home Overview Automation Multicloud Security Opportunity

1. Multicloud Is the New Normal, IDC, Mar. 2018.

Go to Security

Cisco’s unique multicloud capabilities include:Consistent network policy across multicloudExclusive integrations with public cloud platforms that enable consistent network and security policy across IT-managed data centers and public cloud

Foundation for multicloud infrastructureHybrid computing stacks co-developed with leading public cloud providers that bring cloud services on-premises to power cloud-native applications and rapid innovation

Programmable infrastructureEssential for cloud and DevOps, Cisco’s data center networking and computing products are architected from the ground up to enable digital enterprises to securely follow their apps all the way from the multicloud to the edge.

Cisco DevNetFree tools, learning labs, developer sandboxes, and community resources that help IT operators grow their careers as automation experts and DevOps practitioners

Embracing and accelerating a multicloud strategy is fundamental to ensure that apps and data are delivered reliably, irrespective

of the physical location. But what about security?

VisibilityYou can’t protect something you can’t see. Cisco can help you understand what’s on the network and in the data center, how cloud and on-premises applications function, and who is accessing them. It achieves that with a solution that inspects every packet of data crossing the data center, sets benchmarks, and automatically identifies and flags anomalies.

Threat protectionToday’s data centers are multilayered, and they need a multilayered security approach that can match. Cisco enables businesses to detect, block, and dynamically respond to prevent data theft or a disruption in operations, and will also provide new insights into attacker behavior to limit the impact of future threats.

SegmentationA critical part of security is reducing the attack surface to as small as possible and limiting an attacker’s ability to spread from one resource to the other. Cisco can help maintain segmentation capabilities across a distributed data center—edge, core, and multicloud. Properly segregated data means that if a security event occurs, zoning limits the attack.

Security

Securing the anywhere data centerAs the operational boundaries of data centers expand, security must be pervasive to expand with your data center across the edge-to-cloud continuum. Cisco’s portfolio includes advanced security that’s powerful enough to protect whole systems while meticulous enough to inspect individual workloads.

It takes an average of 191 days for businesses to detect a security breach.1

191

Home Overview Automation Multicloud Security Opportunity

1. “The 30 Cybersecurity Stats That Matter Most,” TechBeacon, Mar. 22, 2018, https://techbeacon.com/30-cybersecurity-stats-matter-most.

Go to Opportunity

Cisco’s unique security capabilities include:Advanced workload protectionWelcome to holistic workload protection through a combination of automated zero-trust security, ML-based app clustering, and consistent whitelist policy enforcement.

Global threat intelligenceMeet Cisco Talos™, our global team of threat researchers and sophisticated, cloud-based, AI-enabled systems.

Your digital infrastructure is your most valuable asset, and Cisco takes that seriously. With robust threat detection and an entire team devoted to investigating and annihilating threats, your network stays secure and

your data can do exactly what you want it to.

Opportunity

Discovering potential everywhereWhen apps and data can be anywhere, IT requires fresh and innovative approaches to designing, building, and managing data centers. IT also needs to gain operational consistency and reduce expenses even as customers adopt multicloud infrastructures. Cisco’s strategy brings together automation, multicloud, and security as part of a holistic architecture that ensures that the data center operates anywhere apps and data are. With the Cisco data center, you can maximize application performance, mitigate risk, increase operational agility, and deliver the broadest range of customer business needs.

See how we’re positioned in the market:Gartner names Cisco a Leader in the November 2018 Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

Cisco is positioned as a Leader in the July 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Networking.

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Take your first step to creating the anywhere data center:

Home Overview Automation Multicloud Security Opportunity

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